The use of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and spectroscopy are well-known techniques for imaging tissue and particularly human tissue for the purpose of detecting lesions, cancers and other abnormalities.
The human liver is one organ that can be assessed using MRI. A condition of the liver known as fatty liver disease can lead to an increased risk of cancer, cardiovascular death, and cirrhosis and to reduced effectiveness of anti-viral treatments and is also implicated in the development of diabetes. Currently, histopathologists assess liver fat through visual estimation of the fat content in a liver biopsy specimen. The histopathologist carries out an estimation of the percentage of hepatocytes containing intracellular fat vacuoles and grades the sample on a scale from 0 to 3 or on a continuous scale from 0% to 100%. However, a visual estimation is, by its very nature, subjective and can be potentially unrepresentative of the whole liver. Furthermore, the process is invasive as it requires a biopsy. The accumulation of fat in tissue is often referred to as steatosis.
In terms of methods for quantifying fat in the liver, a number of MRI based techniques exist but these techniques often require complex image processing and suffer from sub-optimal sensitivity and specificity.
With the above in mind, there is a need for improved non-invasive methods for quantifying fat, i.e. steatosis, in organs such as the liver and other organs that are impacted by non-ideal fat levels.